That Moment

Winn Feeling Smug & Hoping Dillon’s Watching

You know that moment when your wife says. “Oh no, we have a problem,” and your heart sinks like an anvil in the ocean with the memory of how whenever it’s time for fix-it husband, you’re all mittens and hiccups, and you look at the catastrophe mocking you so that it feels like you’re in the junior high locker room again, with cool jock Dillon pointing at you and making jokes, and there you are staring at the scattered mess soon to be yet one more humiliation?

And then you know that unicorn moment when you clearly see what needs to be done and have the tools to do it and the tools (eureka!) do what you ask of them after only 6 or 7 failed attempts and then you stand in the kitchen like a gladiator who’s triumphed awaiting roses and kisses, and think: “Eat my toenails, Dillon”?

I had one of those.

Carried by Mercy

Canongate Kirk, Edinburgh

One afternoon, needing a break from preparing a lecture, Charles Dickens took an afternoon stroll in Edinburgh’s Canongate Kirkyard. In his journal, he described how one gravestone’s etchings caught his attention: “Ebenezer Lennon Scroogie—A Mean Man.” Dickens mulled the stark description, concocting a story of a miserly man so harsh and joyless to deserve such an epitaph. A Christmas Carol was born.

However, Dickens had misread. The inscription said meal man, not mean man. The real Scroogie was a corn merchant (known as a “meal man”). He was gregarious and beloved and apparently a merry-maker at all the parties. A mistake (merely replacing an n with an l), led to one of our most beloved stories.

Dickens spent decades honing his craft, diligent and disciplined. With characters and sentences, he was a literary savant. Still, without that one stroll in an old graveyard, without one odd encounter where he misread a single word, he’d never have written this monumental tale. Dickens’ masterpiece wasn’t something he controlled, but a whim of grace. The word for this is mercy.

mercy (noun) compassionate or kindly forbearance offered to one in need or to one who does not possess the power to remedy their situation

Today is the eighth day of Christmas, and it also happens to be the day when we turn the calendar to a new year. Maybe we’re revving for a fresh start, fresh beginnings, new possibilities. But maybe we’re numbed by regret or loneliness or grief.

Whatever our story, sooner or later we’ll all be in need of compassion and forbearance. Eventually, all of us need help. Each of us need a generous God to bend toward us. We may work hard to pretend otherwise, but none of us have final control over our lives or our future. We’re responsible to do the best we can, but then we have to relent. We have to trust grace to be tender and kind.

All of us are carried by mercy. All of us.

Hope Is a Dangerous Thing

Trapped inside the caged walls of the Shawshank State Penitentiary, Red tells Andy words that might save him. “Hope is a dangerous thing,” Red says. “It can kill a man.”

Hope rattles us, terrifies even, especially if we’ve lived with our eyes and our heart wide open, especially if we’ve told ourselves the truth about the ache and the lament. One thing’s certain: if we love full throttle and don’t hold our cards close to the chest, we will absolutely face that brutal pain we’re so desperate to avoid: disappointment. Hope is a dangerous thing.

But anything that’s truly good always carries danger with it. If we’re playing it safe, no one’s having kids, no one’s getting married, no one’s going to write a book or a poem or dream of a new tomorrow or follow a carpenter who acts like he’s God. Love and hope and danger—another trinity.

“Hope is a dangerous thing, my friend, it can kill a man,” says Red. “[But] hope is a good thing, maybe even the best of things. And good things never die.”

Hope intrude everywhere. Dangerous hope. Consider these tulips by our mailbox. Every Spring, they insist on this same story. They’re “hopemongers,” as my friend John likes to say. Keep loving. Keep believing. Keep hoping. Good things never die.

Doxology

When we first began to dream about what the Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination might be, the last thing I thought we’d do was organize something that smelled like a conference. Though there are happy exceptions, I often feel claustrophobic in such spaces, and Eugene was wary, avoiding them as much as he possibly could, typically going to speak only when his agent or publisher or a friend twisted his arm. And yet, in our first Peterson Center retreat, a desire kept emerging.

A number of folks expressed an ache for a space where we could name our longing for the holy, the beautiful, the good. To blow on the soul’s embers and awaken our longing for God. Might it be possible to have sacred space where (without falling prey to yet another scheme we’re certain will fix our troubles, always a disaster), we might carry in our weary-but-steadfast hearts our lament over (to borrow from Heschel) our “embarrassment at our pettiness, prejudices, envy, and conceit…embarrassment at the profanation of life”?

So, I carried a lot of hope, but more than a little trepidation too, when we decided to create and host Doxology. Is it possible to do something like this and resist the machine, the celebrity nonsense, the way we seem to always find a way to bludgeon the simplicity and wonder out of all good things? Is it possible for a few days like this to be about prayer and presence rather than production? Could we together practice that often lost art of being truly holy and wondrously human (two words that, because of the Incarnation, belong together)?

Last year, I feared the always lurking temptation to be overly scripted, to cave to our anxieties for things to go well and assuage that anxiety with the typical salves: too many words, too much polish, too little comfort with gaffe. Then Cherith Fee Nordling fell ill the night before we began, and Paul Zach missed a flight due to weather. And I thought, “Well, God saved us from clutching to any script.” When the days concluded, my overwhelming sense was gratitude. Beauty will do that to you.

This is still very much a work in progress, and I’d love to invite you to come be part of making Doxology whatever it is supposed to be. There will be laughter and spaciousness and rich words and art. And God. Whatever else succeeds or fails, we will turn our hearts homeward, in Doxology.

“We crave radiance in an austere world,” writes the poet Elizabeth Alexander. This puts words to my hope, my need, as good as anything.

__

Get a glimpse of last year in the video.

Oct 2-4

To guard the spirit of Doxology, space is limited. Details are available here, with early bird discounts for just a bit. And if you can’t afford it but really want to be with us, email hello@petersoncenter.org and share your need.

Buechner

Another giant falls in the forest.

I’m thinking of Eugene and Frederick, the two of them sitting at the same time in the pews at Madison Ave Presbyterian in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, young and open to the world and wild, not knowing each other but both having their profound encounter with grace via the lyric and power of George Buttrick’s preaching. Who could have known how the words would flow, how they’d evoke such wonder in us, such hope, such yearning for a life faithful and beautiful and good.

I hope they are sharing quite a view and a bourbon together now, if it works that way. And I hope that Eugene and Frederick know how much they’ve meant to us, how many of us felt the dark fall back a little when we encountered something so marvelous and simple as a sentence, a string of hearty words put to true use. Can you really open a whole world or put salve to a deep, ancient wound with only one clear, heart-wrenching line? I hope they know how many of us felt less alone and more emboldened and more alive in God because of how they helped us to see and hear and stand in awe.

Frederick, you told us that beautiful and terrible things would happen — but you also told us, “Don’t be afraid.” We’re trying. We really are.

Always Something Beautiful

Cemetery in Fanore, County Claire, Ireland

Our family is in County Claire, Ireland, walking the Burren Way. On one stretch, we walked 13 miles to the little village by the sea, Fanore, only to discover this is the burial place of one of Miska’s favorite modern poets, John O’Donohue. He left us too soon, in 2008. The cemetery is a small plot tucked into a stark, bare hillside, with an expansive view of the wild Atlantic. John often said that if we’re to endure times of bleakness, it is essential to always keep the image of something beautiful in your soul. His resting place does just this.

I met a young woman who was visiting the grave of a loved one. She was friends with John and shared stories of how he’d light up every room he entered, and how in the lashing rain, she’d take her dog to the beach — and John would be the only other person out reveling in the tempest along with her. John would ask how she was, and she’d reply with a quick brush-off response.

“No,” he’d say (and you have to hear this in the strong Irish lilt this woman and John shared). “How are you really?”

So, I hope you are keeping your heart’s eye on something beautiful. And I hope you have someone near you who every once in a while says, “No, how are you really.”

Thank you, John. You gave us so much.

Southern Portion of the Cliffs of Moher
Cliffs of Moher

Travails

There are many travails to being a fellow with as much handyman sense as a medium-sized brick. Winter simply brings new opportunities to reveal my inadequacies.

One morning a couple days ago, I woke to another majestic quilt of white. We received only a few inches, which means I could easily clear the driveway by hand with my snow pusher (not to be confused with a snow shovel or snow scooper or snow scraper—these are the intricate details one learns with a year under their belt in the Northern tundra). However, since winter has so far merely tipped its hat and winked, it seemed time to fire up the Orange Beast and make sure all was well.

My friends, all was not well.

After reviewing the starting instructions (go easy, I only have 1 season of experience), I meticulously clipped through the regimen: open the fuel line, turn on the choke, insert the ignition key, flip the start switch, pump the primer bulb. Each in precise order, a NASA engineer prepping for launch. Then, moment of truth: I pulled the start rope, expecting that mighty roar, that blast of horsepower, that potent rumble validating my masculinity.

Instead, I only strained my shoulder, pull after clattering pull. This is a new blower, mind you. I’ve used it 6-7 times. I haven’t even bothered to remove the tags. It still gleams. Yet there I was in my garage, eyeing my machine intently, lifting wires, rubbing the top of the engine like it was a bottle holding a genie, doing all the sorts of things one does whenever you’re trying to be useful but have no idea what you’re doing or what you’re even looking for.

Two manuals. Multiple YouTube videos. Scrolling the manufacturer’s website FAQ’s. More YouTube.

After hours of this infuriating madness, the only thing I’d discovered that I hadn’t yet tried was replacing the spark plug. It’s possible that—due to someone who shall not be named maybe over-priming the gas—the plug may have fouled. But true to form for me, one fixit possibility opens 3 new problems. One needs a spark plug wrench (what size?). One apparently needs a spark plug gap gauge. One needs to know how to gap the spark plug and how to replace it.

“This is so simple,” you say. Well, for you, yes, I understand. That’s the point of this sad tale. This is how the shame piles on for guys like me. These are the travails.

I’m happy to report that after a bit more YouTube, visits to two automotive stores, and one wrestling match with a socket set, I did in fact get my spark plug replaced. And I did (cue Handel’s Messiah) hear the Orange Beast roar. I let it purr for 2-3 minutes to clear the lines—but mainly to revel in my triumph. “Who’s King of the garage now?”

But then, rolling my blower away, I saw a large stainless steel nut and washer lying on the ground, exactly where my blower had just been. I’ve combed over every inch of this blasted machine, thumbed through schematics (twice). I have no idea from whence it came, no idea whether it’s an unessential add-on or whether, on some freezing January morning, my blower will wheeze and jolt and crumble.

I keep looking at my blower intently, curiously, lifting wires, as if I have some clue. I do not. And that metal nut and washer lie there. “Rookie,” they say, shaking their head.

We Belong to One Another

On Christmas Eve, I always need to take at least an hour and get out into the holiday energy. It began as a boy when my dad, who commenced his Christmas shopping around 2:00 on the 24th, would take me with him to Cox’s department store and load up gifts for mom. Every year, the bedraggled but somehow still standing folks in the the gift wrapping department knew they could pack up their silver paper and red bows for the season as soon as they finished with my dad and his boxes .

I’ve carried on a version of this tradition, venturing out for a few final stocking stuffers and a couple items we don’t need from the grocery. Some years I cave and buy eggnog that I’ll drink alone. Really, I’m heading out to see the smiles and feel the joy. These gifts are too rare these days. There’s so little we share, so little that feels neighborly, so little that makes me believe maybe we still remember that we belong to one another.

This year on Christmas Eve, I found myself at Aldi where a scruffy, white-bearded man in jeans and a black and grey flannel checked out in front of me. Among his items was a dozen roses. After paying, he pulled out one rose and handed it to the cashier. She blushed, said thank you. On his way out, he handed a rose to every cashier in the row. One fellow leaned against his cart, waiting for a woman swiping her card through the machine. The white bearded florist tapped the fellow on the shoulder. “Give this to her,” he said, pointing to the woman.

The gift-giver rolled his cart out the sliding doors, leaving a trail of red roses and warm hearts.

Some of us remember.

Sulfur and Fire

Growing up, my mom was always hot, which is a difficulty if you live in Waco, Texas, where it doesn’t feel like proper summer until you can fry eggs sunny side up on the sidewalk. We kept the AC cranking full throttle (with dad marveling at the electric bill, though no big complaint because he liked it as cold as she did). When we were dating and Miska visited, she’d bring winter gear, even in July, to bundle up when indoors. She referred to our house as “the meat locker.”

Despite the arctic frost pouring out our AC vents, mom would mop her forehead and bemoan the heat wave. Miska would be wrapped in a blanket on the couch, a little Arkansas icicle—and mom would be walking through the house, pained, like it was the Sahara Desert under noon’s scorching rays.

Vonda and I really got a laugh, though, when mom would go room to room turning off all the lights. “The lights are radiating heat,” she said, flipping switches as if she were shutting down a nuclear reactor. We’d pass knowing grins and chuckle and just let mom do her thing.

Now we live in Michigan where the summer can roast, but in Texas, we would have called this season Fall. For the past month, our AC was on the fritz, though I’m hesitant to complain due to fear of having my Texan Card revoked. Nevertheless, it was weeks of open windows and refraining from using the oven. It was a struggle. On days when I ran, I took cold showers which helped only a little. Sweat pouring, I’d stand in front of our big floor fan (one worthy of sitting in a mechanic’s bay), begging the heat gods to relinquish me from their furnace.

I found myself going room to room turning off those darn lights, those little incinerators pumping sulfur and fire. I’m sorry I doubted you, mom.

A Vast and Rugged Grace

The Rio Grande. 2021

There are places where you sink into the vastness, where you stand silent under the broadest sky, a world you had not recognized until it threatened to swallow you whole. You hear the stillness, a terrible mercy, a gracious reckoning of all you carried into these rugged vistas.

This stunning, wondrous, brutal land does not need me. It asks me for nothing save my reverence. This is God’s country. And I am free.

Sunset at Big Bend, 2021
Top